If I had to guess, the front boxwoods were dying, yet the leaves were still green, the inside of the stems appeared healthy when I broke one, and when I dug into the soil, there was no indication of deeper root problems. It seemed important, but I couldn’t say why, and I was, admittedly, a plant person, not an experienced agent. I was likely to think inside a plant box when none existed.
When I couldn’t verbalize why the black mold was important, the other techs wandered away, uninterested in my discovery. And they had a point, summed up by Riley. “What could mold have to do with three families going whacky?”
Molds did a lot of bad stuff, including causing hallucinations, but three families? All at the same time? In exactly the same way? When it wasn’t affecting the rest of us? It wasn’t likely. I made a note in my tablet—not the easiest thing to do wearing the uni’s gloves—took a photo, and, just to be on the safe side, I scraped off some mold into an evidence bag and sealed it. Then I went to get Occam. I wanted to see the other houses.
I wasn’t lead agent. I had to check in. I felt tethered. And stubbornly resistant to being tethered. But I remembered something my mama had often said when I was young. “I may not always like it, but I can work in the system.” For her, “the system” had been church and an extended family and sister-wives and many, many children to help raise. For me, the system was law enforcement.
Occam caught my eye at the back door of the house, changing out of his uni, and putting on a new one. His face was set into hard lines, cool and unemotional, and the sight of his expression made me even happier that I had stayed outside. “You okay?” I asked.
“No. This sucks. The kids were beaten in a circular pattern. He used a crowbar. Started at their heads and worked his way around the beds in clock patterns, twelve blows ending back at their heads.”
“Clockwise or widdershins?”
“Bloodstains suggest clockwise.” Clockwise was a direction used in witch workings. He cursed softly and rubbed his forehead. “I’m glad Rick made Tandy sit this one out at the office. Even the fish in the aquarium are swimming in a circle.”
Silent after the terse words, Occam led the way to the next house, both of us wearing clean antimagic unis. The next house was Point B, Alisha Henri’s two-story home, with an open, empty double garage and three family cars parked in the drive, two of them from out of state. Occam paused at the driveway and said, “The FBI SAC just spoke with the hospitalist at UTMC. Two people from this house are currently asymptomatic. They don’t have a theory yet why only the two from this one house seem to be fully recovered, when the rest of the people from all three houses are still exhibiting psychosis.”
The SAC was the special agent in charge, a deliberate reminder that we didn’t have true lead on this site. The FBI did. I stuck out my tongue at him and he laughed, the shadows in his eyes vanishing for a moment, the dimple popping into place. “Thanks. I needed that.” He lifted a hand in a half wave and went inside Alisha’s house. I walked around the yard, taking readings, this time alone and without a tent. The area where the family had been walking in a circle was taped off with crime scene tape and was still redlining. Before I could get more than that accomplished, Occam shouted, “Ingram! In here.”
Ingram. Not “Nell, sugar.” Good. I jogged to the porch and when I entered, found Alisha’s place to be much more empty than I expected. Only two middle-aged feds, wearing wrinkled suits, unis zipped open, half off and hanging on their hips, suitcoats sweat-stained, ties pulled loose at their necks, were in the house.
“I want some P 2.0 measurements inside too,” Occam said to me. To the two others, he said, “Ingram. Probie. A whiz with the new tech.”
The feds grunted without looking up. Occam placed a hand-sketched floor plan into my free fingers. “Read each room and record the results,” he instructed, his face less grim than earlier, his eyes holding something I couldn’t place.
“Probie work,” I muttered, as if it bothered me. Occam snapped his fingers three times, fast, as if telling me to hurry up. “And when you get through, we can chat.”
I didn’t know what he thought I might find, but I started the readings at the front door, working around the two agents, who were both human. The first floor took less than half an hour, and I ended on the second floor, in what looked like a man cave, with a minikitchen, wide-screen TV, chips in bowls, two colas open on side tables. A cat sat in the corner on a cat climber stand that went to the ceiling, the carpeted leap shelves crossing in front of the window where the cat could stare out at birds by day. As I did the readings, I began to get a feeling that Occam wanted me to pick up on something. And I did. I rechecked the levels on both floors before I found him in the kitchen with the feds, looking over the evidence footage—because without a crime being committed here, they couldn’t be called forensic photography or crime scene photos—collected by the first responders. The shots were of Alisha; Kirsten Harrell; her partner, Sally Clements; and Sharon Sayegh, and her husband, Adam Sayegh.
I pushed my way between Occam and a cop and studied the video too. The family all wore nightclothes and were barefoot, walking in a circle. All five had their eyes open, shoulders rounded, stumbling as if sleep-walking. In the vid, police and paramedics approached slowly. The five kept walking. Until a city police officer touched one of the men on the shoulder as if to pull him around. The cop stopped, his back rigid. The man kept walking. Seconds passed. The cop stepped toward the group and tried to join the walkers. Another cop yanked him back, across the yard, and the rest of the officers pulled them both away.
That was interesting. “Is the cop who touched one of them, without a uni, okay?”
“He’s okay,” the bald guy said. “He’ll get a reprimand for being a dumb-ass, but he’s okay.”
“Ingram,” Occam said. “Readings and analysis?”
“Question first. I’ve seen two houses. Is this the only two-story?”
The bald cop swiveled until he faced me and crossed his arms over his chest. “Yeah. Why?”
“I won’t know until I take readings of the other houses, but I have a theory based on the second story and the cat.”
“Based on the cat?” The cop laughed as if he thought I was a silly female. He probably thought all females were silly.
I narrowed my eyes at him and went on. “We have redline readings all over the first floor. Upstairs reads in the low normal range on three psysitope levels and only redlines in psysitope level three. Because I know you guys are unschooled and ignorant about paranormal events, I’ll explain.”
Occam’s mouth quivered with a suppressed smile at my tone. Too bad. I didn’t like being talked down to because of my gender.
“Each of the four levels read by the P 2.0 is specific for each creature species. Witches read high in psysitope one. Weres read high in psysitope three, midrange in psysitopes one and two, and psysitope four nearly zero. The upstairs reads like a were-creature. The difference in readings seems significant. The fish at Point A were swimming in circles, but the cat on the second level here is sitting easy.
“Of the five people who were hospitalized from this house, two victims have already gotten better. Upstairs, two colas were open, two recliners were stretched out, two bowls of chips, and the TV was on, though someone had muted it at some point. Having talked to a visitor who was here last night, I confirmed that three blood-related females were in the kitchen drinking wine and two unrelated people were upstairs watching the game.
“I’d say that the contamination, whatever it is, is low to the ground. It’s also possible that it’s bloodline specific.”
The bald-headed cop kept his eyes on me but spoke to Occam. “This the little girl who brought down Benton?”
I felt my cheeks heat at the little-girl comment. Thomas Benton the fourth had been the head of the Knoxville FBI. He had not been human. “Yes, I am,” I said, silently adding, you creepy misogynist. I smiled sweetly instead, but looked him up and down, head to foot. “He was a Welsh gwyllgi. A devil dog. Something you boys missed entirely.” With that, this little girl got out of there. Before I said something that could get me fired.
As I walked out the door, the bald cop asked Occam, “What the hell was that about?”
“You called her ‘little girl.’”
“She is little. And young enough to be my daughter.”
I had a feeling that the bald cop had ongoing gender and age sensitivity issues. Stuff I had learned in a half-day seminar on diversity at Spook School. Behind me, Occam answered, and I slowed to hear.
“You meet her at a church social, you can attempt to address her any way you want, hoss,” Occam said, a thread of something I couldn’t identify in his tone. “On the job? She’s a competent field agent. Learn some professional manners or go home.
“And before you try to make this your assessment, I’ve already documented that Special Agent Ingram offered her professional expertise and conclusions. And I’ll be sending that up the line to your boss, the ADIC, Penny Francoeur. And, hey. You call her ‘little girl’ too? How’s she like that?”
No one answered. I heard Occam leave the house behind me and I hurried to put some space between me and my bad temper. And my hero. I had seldom been protected in my life; it was nice having someone stand up for me, and I couldn’t hide the smile on my face.
The third house, Point C, was easy to find. It was on a triangle from the first two, and it was full of cops. Because here, like at the other single-story house, there were dead inside.
A middle-aged man and two elderly people, a man and woman, had died violently, and the bodies were still on scene while CSI and PsyCSI worked up the site. The specialized team from outside Washington, DC, had sent enough techs to cover multiple sites, the pond, the other houses, and here. Thankfully I wouldn’t have to work up this site with the P 2.0. That had already been done, by the DC team with their own 2.0 device, but it didn’t stop me from having to see the house and the killing scene.
Occam said, “You need the experience, Nell. If you’re gonna remain a PsyLED special agent, you’ll see plenty of these scenes.”
“Yeah?” I challenged my former (like two minutes past) hero. “How many have you seen?”
“Before today? Four. Four scenes with dead bodies. One of them children. After today that brings my total to seven.”
I screwed my face up into something worse than a frown, but when Occam stripped out of his dirty uni, I changed out of mine. At the door, we put on fresh 3PEs. I was not looking forward to this. Every time I blinked my eyes, I saw the dead bodies floating in the pond. I never had nightmares, and I wondered if that was about to change.
The house was an open floor plan, tastefully furnished in greens with white cabinetwork, trim, and woodwork. The place smelled of fresh paint and the stink of new furniture. The neutral-toned carpet was brand-new clean, and the furniture was upholstered in a pleasing mix of fabrics. It wasn’t a house where young children lived, but looked like the house of empty nesters who had only recently finished redecorating. Maybe just in time for children and parents to come for Thanksgiving. There were three bedrooms in the main part of the house, all showing signs of having been used the night before, and a separate suite in the back that appeared to have been added on. The suite was where the bodies had been found, a bloody track of bare footprints on the new carpet, leading from it.